Re: Long names are doom ?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

If you're going to have an arbitrary and capricious limit on identifier
length, then 42 is a better number than 31.

One can argue all day about programming style. Hemmingway had a very
different writing style when compared to James Joyce. (And we can compare
the both of them to Douglas Adams if you like.:-) Were both good writers?
While the analogy doesn't hold across all cases, consider that it is
possible to write good programs with short identifiers and with long
identifiers. Which to use and when may be a matter of the project at hand
and the style chosen for the project. (Short shell scripts probably don't
need extensive naming conventions but multi-million SLOC rocket control
systems will probably benefit if all identifiers are not restricted to 6
characters.)

I think that engineers have to make some stylistic choices when undertaking
a particular project, and those choices will have tradeoffs. It would be
wrong for a language to force you to *never* use identifiers longer than 6
(or 31) characters. Computers are big. If you're going to have an arbitrary
limitation for ease of implementation, why not make it 256? Nobody is likely
to complain that they can't write code because the identifiers they use need
to be bigger than that.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Steve Bellenot" <bellenot@math.fsu.edu> wrote in message
news:9ekrc2$hk0$1@news.fsu.edu...
> While 31 is arbitrary and obviously ``wrong'' for not being 0, 1 or
> infinity, I must agree that identifiers longer that most Russian novels
> are worst. [Especially to those of us who have worked with people who
> indent 2 spaces at a time, use a 132 column editor and consider the
> whitespace as a goal to fill.] That is there must be some number n
> where the pain of seeing identifiers of length > n is worst than the
> pain of having to make all identifers have length <= n. It is more
> likely that the answer is 42, but it could be 31.